Anarchaia

Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)

31jul2008

E-Z steps to make your own Beijing air at home, yeeeech.

Yield Prolog, version 1.0 has been released.

I am like Jack and I tell you this
I will be your lover and exorcist
In the stillness of the mosquito sunset
you will make love to me to your very best
— The Gun Club, Jack On Fire

The Little Books in Oz, Chris Rathman: “My latest postings into this gray area are translations of the remaining Little Books to Oz – consisting of The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer, The Little MLer and A Little Java, A Few Patterns” Whew.

Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, Basic Guidelines of the W3C.

The Psychiatric Infrastructure of the City, “The Big Dig was a massively expensive urban engineering project that put Boston’s Central Artery underground, freeing up space on the earth’s surface for parks and businesses.”

In search of epiphany, Chris Okasaki: “I watched the movie Proof last night. I highly recommend it. It’s not often that mathematicians get so much screen time.”

I take off my watch and my earrings
My bracelets and everything
Lie on my back and moan at the ceiling
Oh baby…
— Lucinda Williams, Right In Time

inferno-ds, Native Inferno Kernel for the Nintendo DS. I wonder how to use Acme with A, B, X, Y.

The run of a lifetime, “Japan’s athlete monks run up to two marathons a day for 100 days on their path of enlightenment.” WJW.

How MOS 6502 Illegal Opcodes really work, good to know.

30jul2008

Darcs retrospective, and the future, GHC ponders Git. (I was just too big, but hey, bzr clones even slower. :P)

Unnecessary Knowledge, you can’t have enough.

My brain is moving way too fast
How long is it gonna last
I can’t breathe til you go away
Won’t you see what you’re doing to me?
— The Lost Sounds, Destructo Comet

sunny side up, <3.

DjangoCon is the first official international Django conference. It aims to bring together the community and provide a wide range of sessions, panels, lightning talks and showcases of Django usage within various businesses. The first DjangoCon will be on September 6–7, 2008 in Mountain View, CA at the Googleplex. Nice location.

D for disaster
E for my eyes
A for my anger
D before I die
M for Money
O oh good
O oh good
N for the night
— Dead Moon, Dead Moon Night

Type-Mimikri: LED äfft LCD nach, nett.

Presentation Files, of OSCON 2008. Thank you, Microsoft. (Sigh.)

A J Simulator for a Meccano Differential Analyzer, by Keith Smillie. Who could resist.

29jul2008

The Survey, 2008, at A List Apart.

Functional Programming Koans, in OCaml, neat ones.

No need for your hell
I have no need for anything
I am God
I know someone happy
I am God
Shut out the cold, kneel and pray
I am God
— Virgin Prunes, I Am God

A Souped-Up Model T May Have Been the First Mash-Up, by Steve Lohr. Awesome what they made out of it!

Fire from Heaven, Adrian Smith reviews q and Jeffry Borror’s book “q For Mortals”. (While I really like the book, I have to disagree about the distinction between q gods and mere mortals; it seemed superfluous and annoyingly overweening to me.)

Ex-Googlers reinvent web search, The Register found Quantum porn. NSFW.

Just answer me,
what was the point of all that treachery,
and soon we’ll see
the truth behind all of your blasphemy.
— London After Midnight, Shatter

Light Mills, lots of open questions.

RubyFringe 2008: Killing Floor In Toronto, by Zed Shaw.

If FailCamp succeeds, is it still FailCamp?, a report by Alex Hilman.

28jul2008

Happy Birthday, dear Lambda!, and it’s still the ultimate programming languages blog.

Cuil, a new search engine. Way early, but at least they have the people.

Dead of night
I had a dream
Sky was bright yes and the
Fields were green
I was down the road
In a cloud of dust
Me and the wanderlust.
— Mark Knopfler, Wanderlust

Random Word Generator, if you run out of single letter variable names.

Fake Twitter Status, lovely, isn’t it?

ZombieHarmony, One of the Best Free Dating Sites for Zombies.

Once we made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender
Blood brothers in a stormy night
With a vow to defend
No retreat, baby, no surrender
— Bruce Springsteen, No Surrender

It’s 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future, Scenes From An IBM Slide Presentation. Nothing is as it has been.

Das einzige Mittel, das Leben zu ertragen, ist: es schön zu finden. — Rudolf Leonhard

FUCKING NDA.

Macintosh SE/X, a Macintosh SE that runs Mac OS X. Cool mod.

27jul2008

Upcycled Pallet Made Furniture By Studiomama, KISS.

Apollo Control Panel, WJW.

Love brings such misery and pain
I know I’ll never be the same
Since I fell for you
— The Sonics, Since I Fell For You Lyrics

Debugging Visual Metaphors, Gilad Bracha shows the Newspeak debugger.

YouTotem, a GreaseMonkey script to look at YouTube using mplayer.

The Fibonacci Numbers, Coalgebraicaly, “What kind of Haskell programmer can I call myself if I haven’t written a fiendishly complex piece of code to inefficiently compute the Fibonacci numbers.”

Life’s a struggle every day
Throw ourselves out in your way
Just sitting, waiting for the day
When the strength, and the number’s come your way
— The Wipers, So Young

Solving nonograms in Haskell. Nicely explained.

When is one thing equal to some other thing? (PDF), by Barry Mazur. “One can’t do mathematics for more than ten minutes without grappling, in some way or other, with the slippery notion of equality.”

Travelling Still, awesome shots.

26jul2008

Cthulhu Tract, by Fred Van Lente and Steve Ellis.

halbes vergessen, Felix Schwenzel schlägt vor, alte Blogeinträge nicht mehr indizieren zu lassen. Überlegenswert.

NASA Images, a huge archive.

The only way that I can see
Is to hold you close to me:
To love you, for it’s meant to be;
I weaken your attack.
— Bonnie Prince Billy, Black

Google Code blacklists Mozilla Public License, Google’s MPL ban follows the block on FSF’s Affero GPL.

cmus is a small and fast text mode music player for Linux and many other UNIX like operating systems. Highly useful.

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. Torrents available.

Cornbrator, Hyper Wank Device. PNSFW.

Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you’re the queen of the underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave
— The Rolling Stones, Dead Flowers

I’m the Sheik of Araby… with no pants on!

for the love of type, by “Mrs Eaves”. Do not miss the videos.

We knew the web was big, Google operates on a trillion unique URLs. (If they got $10 for each URL, they could pay back the US national debt.)

25jul2008

Prophet is a new kind of database designed for the post Web-2.0 world. It’s made to let you collaborate with your friends and coworkers without needing any kind of special server or internet provider. Way to go!

A do-ocracy is an organizational structure in which individuals choose roles and tasks for themselves and execute them. Responsibilities attach to people who do the work, rather than elected or selected officials.

Everything you are I’m tearing through
Everything you want I’m wanting too
I gave you more than I thought I could ever do
But I will never break you down
— Neutral Milk Hotel, I Will Bury You In Time

nowdothis.com, the first GTD app that really works. Try it!

Linear Objects: logical processes with built-in inheritance, by Jean-Marc Andreoli and Remo Pareschi.

Low hills, colors gone crazy,
you standing like a ghost with the water behind you.
It’s hard to grab ahold of some things sometimes,
like you need me to remind you.
— The Mountain Goats, Papagallo

Wie entsteht Heterosexualität?, genial.

Octopuses given Rubik’s Cubes to find out if they have a favourite tentacle, imagine they solved them!

Happy Sysadmin Day, thanks to all my roots and rootresses!

24jul2008

iPod Drink, a picture says more than words.

LIL, The Little Implementation Language, has been a lost and overlooked chapter in the history of Unix and the C language.

Manuale Typographicum, by Hermann Zapf. Online version of a wonderful work.

Temporal virtues of forgotten lands
And nocturnal skies
Will shine for me
A blessing in your eyes
— Rosetta Stone, Shadow

exist.pl, or what happens when philosophers code Perl.

The Blind Spot, lectures on proof-theory by Girard. Recommended.

Mustard Watches, by Yann-Joachim Ringard. Must read!

Paper misspells its name on front page, WJW.

The Sanskrit Heritage Site, the first hypertext Sanskrit dictionary.

Mysterious Chinese Tunnels, “72 years ago, a man named William Zimmerman sat down to tell a story about “mysterious Chinese tunnels” to the U.S. government.” Scary.

Would you be my pale empress
My haven in the gale
Would you be my shelter strong
So, would you be my empress
So strong and yet so pale
Would you sing our, sing our
Sing our empire song
— The Merry Thoughts, Pale Empress

Distorted Software, Thomas Guest wonders: “What will the software for this Product look like?”

Waldverherrlichung sind allgemein Walddarstellungen, die den Wald verharmlosen oder ihn sogar als ein wunderbares Paradies darstellen.

1.3 million cable ties, “Something like a birds-nest of cable ties. That’s what the artwork of 1.3 million cable ties is, created by students of the Academy of Arts in Munich. The students transformed space into an amorphous landscape by weaving and lashing thousands and thousands of cable ties.”

23jul2008

Locus Solum: From the rules of logic to the logic of rules, by Jean-Yves Girard. Yes, this has been posted before, but this time I want you to skip straight to Appendix A and read it. You won’t regret. (If you have no time, read the section on “Fermat” and “Higher Order Logics” only.)

How to Make Your Own Tonic Water, maybe worth a try.

Homöopathika sind Placebos, news at 11. Trotzdem lesenswert.

Human Mirror, neat.

Document-centric GNOME, longish talk by Federico Mena-Quintero. Essentially shows that time-lines should be adopted for desktop use (ls -ltr is my most used command, probably.)

Picture it for me, the velocity
The airplane Ultima built nothing like I’d ever seen
The words that were written, the books that were burned
I knew it when I saw you, I knew when I saw
I knew it when I saw you, I knew when I saw
— Jesse James, Boyskout

sedtris.sed, Tetris in sed. WJW.

Staapl is a dynamically typed, two-stage, functional concatenative programming system, built on top of PLT Scheme. It consists of Coma, a concatenative macro language with a pattern matching language for defining primitive code transformers in Scheme, a two-stage Forth-like language on top of Coma and a tethered interaction system.

ZeroMQ, a highly efficient and lightweight messaging queue written in C++. “Transfers 2M messages a second on a 1Gb network with one CPU at each end.”

First hints of Microsoft’s “fight back” ads appear, but the Bible says Vista still sucks.

Someday when I’m older
I’ll realize
That I was wrong
But right now
It feels like
I just want
Everyone!
— Spin, Aerodrone

Tacky, if you still don’t love Jack Shedd’s Big Contrarian after reading this, I’m sorry, I can’t help you.

Get Your Computer Online Using Your iPhone’s Data Connection, or how to make the iPhone actually useful.

Calskrove is a Calzone, a pizza (one that you fold one half over the other) with a Skrovmål inside. A Skrovmål is a basicly a menu with a big ass hamburger and fries.

22jul2008

Anaximandrake, a blog that makes me wish I really had learned Greek, continued French, and not forgotten Latin.

DragonFly July 2008 Release 2.0, featuring the HAMMER file system. Should check that out.

Mike Tyson Mansion, now abandoned.

Japanese onomatopoeia, chi–n!

Als sie ertrunken war und hinunterschwamm Von den Bächen in die größeren Flüsse Schien der Opal des Himmels sehr wundersam Als ob er die Leiche begütigen müsse. — Bertolt Brecht, Vom ertrunkenen Mädchen

Calendar, a nice interface.

The A-Z of Programming Languages: Modula-3, “Luca Cardelli on why Modula-3 played a major role in popularizing the notion of type-safe programming and why Modula-3 is still vastly superior to programs such as Java.”

“Fools” thought I, “You do not know
Deja like a cancer grows.
Your words may yet come back to haunt you,
Ten years from now they may still taunt you”
But my thoughts just spiralled into space,
And echoed
Off the face of keystrokes
— Sound Of Silence Revisited

Rutgers Graduate Student Finds New Prime-Generating Formula, nice and pretty simple.

Pablo Picasso: Animals in Art, eleven developments of a lithograph.

Gist, which looks like a cheap Pastie clone at first glance, quickly unfolds its Gitty magic when you notice you are able to fork pastes! An Emacs snippet for pasting.

21jul2008

Jason Kottke solves Twitter’s scaling issues, and I’m not kidding. Who builds the first fetch-updates.txt-of-all-my-friends client?

Java Is Too Academic, pretty much.

snoozemail, by Toby Segaran. “Send or forward email to x@snoozemail.com, e.g. 3@snoozemail.com and the email will come back to you x days later.”

Clue is an ANSI C compiler (C89, some C99) that targets high-level languages such as Lua, Javascript or Perl. It supports the entire C language, including pointer arithmetic, and can be used to run arbitrary pure-C programs. Cool!

Seasons may change
and they hold wild flowers,
raising their face to the sun.
All that are born from our soft rainshowers
are wild flowers.
— All About Eve, Wild Flowers

Itching my programming nerve, Joe Armstrong on Scalaris and reimplementing Wikipedia.

Baby’s First Internet, by Kevin Fanning and Kean Soo. Essential reading!

The Berlin Requiem at Everything2.

And buddha sits on my shelf shooting up Edgar Allan Poe
And I’ll dream in forbidden colours just like Vincent van Gogh
I don’t need no suit of armour
I don’t need no sword and shield
I don’t need no immortality
I don’t need no elysian fields
— The Mission, From One Jesus To Another

Nginx Upload Module, does all the multipart stuff before you hit the app. (Lacks file size limitation, though.)

Jazzers and Programmers, by Nick Sieger. A summary of his RubyFringe talk.

Partial vectorisation of Haskell programs, by Manuel M. T. Chakravarty, Roman Leshchinskiy, Simon Peyton Jones, and Gabriele Keller. “In this paper, we present an approach to partial vectorisation that selectively vectorises sub-expressions and data types, and also, enables linking vectorised with unvectorised modules.”

sadtrombone.com, as a counterpart to instantrimshot.com.

20jul2008

DIY iPhone, WJW.

Japanese Design #7: A How-to-Reduce-Packaging Journal, insightful.

Serpents kiss and the children play
Serpents kiss for the words you pray
Serpents kiss and the witching hour
Serpents kiss for my untouched flower
— The Mission, Serpents Kiss

The Free Content License They Used 1800 Years Ago, very nice.

Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund, by Paul Graham.

Day after day I will lead the way
Hello sailor how are you?
Into the abyss
Into the abyss
— Sex Gang Children, Abyss

First-class Macros Have Types, by Alan Bawden. “In modern Scheme, a macro captures the lexical environment where it is defined. This creates an opportunity for extending Scheme so that macros are first-class values. The key to achieving this goal, while preserving the ability to compile programs into reasonable code, is the addition of a type system. Many interesting things can be done with first-class macros, including the construction of a useful module system in which modules are also first-class.”

Logic File System, the filesystem of discriminating hackers. Wow.

19jul2008

China As An Island, “China has land borders with 14 other countries – a world record. And yet you should not think of China as particularly well-integrated with its neighbours.”

rascal-haskell is a mini Haskell like language in Haskell.

Soldier lies bleeding where
a church once stood
Ignore the machine
Ignore the machine.
— Alien Sex Fiend, Ignore The Machine

Domino Domino Logic (YouTube). Create OR, AND and XOR gates out of dominoes. Replacement for TTL and CMOS. XOR is pretty complex.

So give me a drink and dry, dry my eyes
It’s all I ever wished for
And all I ever wanted
All I ever wished for
All I ever wanted
— Virgin Prunes Lyrics, Sons Find Devils

Datamob highlights the connection between public data sources and the interfaces people are building for them.

Hi’ya Bunny!, waving bunnies are the best kind. Yeech.

Fourteen Passive-Aggressive Appetizers, by Yoni Brenner. “Have you ever noticed how sun-dried tomatoes and top-grade peyote look exactly the same? Not a suggestion, really. Just saying.”

18jul2008

C’était un Rendez-Vous, one of the most classic/controversial short films. Its a fast pace film seen through the eyes of the driver, cruising through Paris streets at 140mph with his 275GTB Ferrari early in the morning.

SIMCITY, essay by Neil Gaiman. “Cities are not people.”

So much confusion, dealing with inside
The feelings that I hate, the feelings that I hide
We are pulling our lives into reverse
Tearing our lies, we are casting a curse
— All Gone Dead, Within But Not Before

x86 Disassembly, from Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection.

How Lisp Systems Look Different (PDF), by Adrian Dozsa, Tudor Gîrba, and Radu Marinescu. “In this paper we propose a suite of new visualizations that reveal the special traits of the Lisp language and thus help in understanding complex Lisp sys- tems. To validate our approach we apply them on several large Lisp case studies, and summarize our experience in terms of a series of recurring visual patterns that we have detected.”

They can take away his freedom, they can beat him into the dust
They can burn his home, run him from his land, and leave him out to gather rust
But they can’t take away his faith and his honesty and pride and the knowledge he holds inside
One day they’ll reap the harvest
The grapes of wrath
— The Mission, Grapes Of Wrath

Han Solo in Carbonite in Lego.

Wondermark #426, “In which a Tree gets the Talk”. Yay.

17jul2008

The Development of Intuitionistic Logic, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Muphry’s Law and typoes in the bible.

I don’t believe in miracles
I don’t believe in forgiving
I don’t believe in I can go on
I won’t remember why
I don’t believe in long goodbyes
Never look back for me
— Gary Numan, Miracles

The most beautiful suicide, stunning.

Book Covers, an excellent blog.

Scrap your type applications (PDF), by Barry Jay and Simon Peyton Jones. “We introduce System IF, for implicit System F, in which many type applications can be made implicit. It supports decidable type checking and strong normalisation.” Highly useful.

A relational calculus for the design of distributed algorithms, by Frans Johan Rietman.

Constructing a fair 3 sided coin, tricky.

Warten auf den Regen,
der den ganzen Dreck wegspritzt,
der in meiner Strasse und meiner Wohnung
und in meiner Seele sitzt.
— Die Toten Hosen, Regen

ICFP Contest 2008 in TeX, WJW. More than WJW. Most badass I saw lately. (And the code is less evil than you may imagine.)

dtwitzen is a compact twitter client using dzen.

Flexibin, it’s probably the most elegant and functional waste bin in the world. Gotta get wire.

16jul2008

Pomosexual is a neologism used to describe a person who shuns sexual orientation labels (such as heterosexual and homosexual) that define individuals, and in turn chooses not to label oneself with a sexual orientation.

Lebowskitheory.com, WJW. You must read the conclusion.

Oh My Science!, replacing god with reason… one tweet at a time.

Hold me
Hold me up so high
And never let me down
— The Cure, One More Time

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States, the big picture. What a mess.

Keeping Tabs: The history of an Information Age metaphor, by Ed Tenner. “The modern tab was an improvement on a momentous 19th-century innovation, the index card.”

How to Write With Style, by Kurt Vonnegut. Please read.

Pentago Strategy Guide, interesting game.

Peoples Archive is dedicated to collecting for posterity the stories of the great thinkers, creators, and achievers of our time. The people whose stories you see on this site are leaders of their field, whose work has influenced and changed our world. Has great, detailed navigation.

CRUSH (Custom Reporting Utilities for SHell) is a collection of tools for processing delimited-text data from the command line or in shell scripts.

You’ll see them asleep in the rain tonight
These are saddened times today
This sickened place we live
We walk right through the wrecking yard
— Switchblade Symphony, Wrecking Yard

Random Recipe Generator, yum yum.

Software & Drama, “Sanya Weathers is annoyed that game studios can’t deliver well-written MMORPG games on time. After all, people do produce plays.”

SandstoneDb is a lightweight Prevayler style embedded object database with an ActiveRecord API that doesn’t require a command pattern and works for small apps that a single Squeak image can handle. The idea is to make a Squeak image durable and crash proof and suitable for use in small office applications.

Grouping in XQuery, I’d have use for that lately.

15jul2008

Deploying a Rack-based Ruby application with Phusion Passenger. Very easy!

Defender of the favicon is a JavaScript remake of Eugene Jarvis’ brilliant arcade game Defender written by Mathieu ‘p01’ Henri and inspired by Scott Schiller’s experiment with generated favicons VU meter. The idea was to push the concept of generated favicons further and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16×16 pixels using JavaScript, canvas and data: URIs.

I see all around me
I didn’t know him for I didn’t see
To live once again, to live in dreams
To live once again, to live once again
— Virgin Prunes, Walls Of Jericho

IFCP 2008 Team home pages, often with sources and writeups.

How Fair is Monopoly?, by Ian Stewart. “Everyone has played Monopoly. But few, I’d imagine, have ever thought about the math involved. In fact, the probability of winning at Monopoly can be described by interesting constructions known as Markov chains.”

The Life Of Riley, the worlds oldest blogger died two days ago at age 108.

Quicksort erratum, by Mauricio Fernandez. Lazy quicksort is nice.

Bubble Calendar, a poster-sized calendar with a bubble to pop every day. WANT HAVE.

PB & J, thank you, Patrick Logan, for writing the first non-bullshit post on Protocol Buffers.

I would tell you
That I loved you
If I thought that you would stay
But I know that it’s no use
That you’ve already
Gone away
— The Cure, Boys Don’t Cry

Walking the Line When You Work from Home, by Natalie Jost at A List Apart. “Every work environment offers distractions, but those who work from home with their families face a unique set of issues—and need equally unique ways of dealing with them.”

radiohead, Data used to produce the House of Cards music video is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Souce code is made available under the Apache License 2.0.

14jul2008

Fast, Inexpensive Content-Addressed Storage in Foundation, by Sean Rhea, Russ Cox, and Alex Pesterev. “Foundation preserves all of a user’s data and its dependencies—fonts, programs, plugins, kernel, and configuration state—by archiving nightly snapshots of the user’s entire hard disk. Users can browse through these images to view old data or recover accidentally deleted files.”

The urban ninja: a synergetic low wind kite project, cool.

Video: Jeff Dean’s Google I/O Presentation, an hour of video. First eight minutes are the architecture of Google’s former datacenters. Worth watching.

Oh until I don’t know where you end and, I begin
Until I just, carry it in me
Carry it in me, carry it in me
I wanna get lost, wanna get lost
Wanna get lost, lost
— Cocteau Twins, Tishbite

Nick Veasey uses x-ray technology to create mesmerizing and intriguing art. In a world obsessed with superficial appearance it is a refreshing change to be able to look beyond the surface. Check out the portfolio.

30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth, impressive.

Do you wanna party? It’s partytime
We gotta party! It’s partytime
Oh, she never had a chance
— 45 Grave, Partytime

A Language for Generic Programming in the Large, by Jeremy G. Siek and Andrew Lumsdaine. “Many programming languages provide generics and have features for describing interfaces, but none completely support the idioms used in generic programming. To address this need we developed the language G.”

Idea: Paintings of descriptions of the paintings, excellent.

The Akwizgran Discrepancy at BLDG BLOG.

13jul2008

MSFP 2008, Dan Piponi put up his slides on “Algebra, Calculus and Antidiagonal Types”. Highly recommended.

Terry Rodgers, what a painter! PNSFW.

D’you get scared to feel so much?
To let somebody touch you?
So hot, so cold, so far, so out of control
Hard to come by, and harder to hold
— The Sisters of Mercy, More

Hyphenation as a Noisy Channel, neat idea.

EXTERMINUS, ah, life.

The Cocaine Auction Protocol: On the Power of Anonymous Broadcast, by Frank Stajano and Ross Anderson. “This paper builds on a case study, of an anonymous auction between mistrustful principals with no trusted arbitrator, to introduce “anonymous broadcast” as a new protocol building block.”

Stay with me, lay with me, lay down by my side
Stay with me, lay with me, take me deep inside
Lay with me, stay with me, lay with me stay…
With me…
Stay…With me
— The Mission, Stay With Me

HTML 5 data- Attributes, Microformats done right.

iPhone App Store and 2.0 OS Initial Miscellany, a random post full of detail.

12jul2008

Amua is a status bar application for Mac OS X that allows you to play Last.fm web-radio streams. Uses iTunes infrastructure.

How to make a Sawed-off USB Key, WJW.

Otl Aicher on Flickr. Excellent as ever.

Oh I miss the kiss of treachery
The aching kiss before I feed
The stench of a love for a younger meat
And the sound that it makes
When it cuts in deep
The holding up on bended knees
The addiction of duplicities
As bit by bit it starts the need
To just let go
My party piece
— The Cure, Disintegration

Rechenaufgaben zur Tour de France.

Period three and chaos, Mark Dominus: “In the copious spare time I have around my other major project, I am tinkering with various stuff related to Möbius functions.”

ICFP 2008 Programming Contest Task Description, control a mars rover.

Motel Project, awesome shots.

And on my neck
The bite you left has started bruising
So go ahead is it my fear or you I’m losing
Enough’s enough don’t know that past tonight I’ll be your one
— The Dollyrots, Love You Most

Radiohead Use Fancy Technology in Camera-Free Video, “Radiohead don’t have time for your petty, archaic devices, such as, um, the camera. Indeed, they’ve gone and made a new music video for In Rainbows’ woozy “House of Cards” that doesn’t make use of a camera at all!” Cool stuff.

iPhone 3G Disassembly, the iFixit guys are passionate…

11jul2008

iPhone OS 2.0 Unlocked, in less than a day. Great job!

Catch me if you can: Towards type-safe, hierarchical, lightweight, polymorphic and efficient error management in OCaml, by David Teller, Arnaud Spiwack, Till Varoquaux.

Look out the window can you see the sky
What color is it can you see the light
And is it raining yet down in the street
And do you talk to everyone you meet
— Sad Lovers And Giants, Alice Isn’t Playing

Dead-listing while on vacation, “Dead-listing is analyzing the raw disassembly of some target software and figuring it out using only pen and paper. This is great for vacations because your laptop won’t get sand in it. You usually have a long period of time to muse about the code in question without interruptions, something hard to find at home these days. And I’ve gotten some of my best ideas after setting aside my papers for a while and going for a long swim.”

OpenVZ Bug 719, too awesome to spoil.

Enterprise Rails Tapping, the downloadable “iPhone Configuration Web Utility” is written in Rails and JavaScript. WTF?

Looking so long at these pictures of you
But I never hold on to your heart
Looking so long for the words to be true
But always just breaking apart
My pictures of you
— The Cure, Pictures Of You

Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras, wow.

Building Users Union, a great idea.

10jul2008

Dress For Dinner Napkins, essential.

The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design, by Jon Tan. An excellent post on an excellent blog, both in design and content.

Bacon is dead! Long live bacon!, BAAACON.

urxvt mouseless url yanking, very useful.

We found you hiding – we found you lying
Choking on the dirt and sand
Your former glories and all the stories
Dragged and washed with eager hands
But oh your city lies in dust, my friend
— Siouxsie And The Banshees, Cities In Dust

AfterStep is a window manager for the Unix X Window System. It still exists!

UBF and VM opcode design, insights by Joe Armstrong. I love using ASCII for opcodes, really.

Thsrs, the shorter thesauruswordbook. Very usefulutile, reallytruly. (The opposite would be nice to have as well.)

OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities. Used by Google, Apache License 2.0.

I think the message of Fight Club is not so much liberating violence but that liberation hurts. What may falsely appear as my celebration of violence, I think, is a much more tragic awareness. — Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek

How a page gets created, “Matt Willey recently recorded his decision-making on a feature design for the Royal Academy magazine.” Amazing how much editing takes place during layout.

In the temple of love
Shine like thunder
In the temple of love
Cry like rain
— The Sisters Of Mercy, Temple Of Love

Functional Netlists, by Sungwoo Park, Jinha Kim, and Hyeonseung Im. “We develop a variant of the lambda calculus, called l-lambda (linear lambda), which may serve as a high-level substitute for netlists. […] The translation of l-lambda into structural descriptions of hardware circuits is sound and complete in the sense that it maps expressions only to realizable hardware circuits and that every realizable hardware circuit has a corresponding expression in l-lambda.”

The War Prayer, by Mark Twain. “The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism…”

09jul2008

ARG_MAX, maximum length of arguments for a new process, fun.

Zoology, “That is, zoos are decoy environments, referring to absent landscapes elsewhere. If this act of reference is read, or interpreted correctly, by the non-human species for whom the landscape has been constructed, then you have a successful zoo.”

Boredom hills you are dear to me now
The ultimate shot of random procedure
— The Moonbabies, Fieldtrip Usa

K as a Prototyping Language, good, practical overview by Dennis Shasha.

New Otto malloc helps spot ancient bugs, Otto Moerbeek (otto@) recently found and fixed an ancient bug (some 33 years old) in yacc(1). Yay.

Handwritten Typographers, Cameron Adams asked ten typographers to send in a handwritten piece.

We’re the Angels and the Darlas,
and in time we’ll be syndicated too.
But for now,
there’s not a door that you can close and we,
we can’t creep through.
— Say Hi To Your Mom, Angels And Darlas

Differentiating regions, cool.

Automating Functional Program Transformation, MSc thesis by Markus Mottl. “We present a framework for automatic program transformation of a strict and pure functional language with a well-defined semantics. It will be shown that such a framework can be implemented most declaratively and concisely in a recently developed higher-order logic programming language called LambdaProlog.” Awesome stuff.

08jul2008

The Slow Death of a City Block: 1900 Montgomery Street, St. Louis.

Higher-Order Logic Programming (PDF), by Gopalan Nadathur and Dale Miller. Includes an introduction to Lambda Prolog.

Let’s die in the arms
of the girls we love
let’s sell our souls
to the man above
— Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Apollo

The Teyjus system is an efficient implementation of the higher-order logic programming language Lambda Prolog. Version 2 has been released recently.

A rewriting system for Joy, by Manfred von Thun. “This paper describes a conditional term rewriting system for Joy based on the two constructors concatenation and quotation.”

Protocol buffers are Google’s language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages – Java, C++, or Python.

I think I’m a little bit
Little bit
A little bit in love with you
But only if you’re a little bit
Little bit
Little bit
In lalalala love with me
— Lykke Li, Little Bit

Anti-paparazzi sunglasses, “They work by mounting two small infrared lights on the front. the wearer is completely inconspicuous to the human eye, but cameras only see a big white blur where your face should be.”

Watch a Movie at a Glance, “Take snapshots of a movie at one-second intervals. Stitch them into one image. What can you see? Pacing. Color palate. Maybe story.” I used to do that with mplayer/mencoder.

xmlroff is a fast, free, high-quality, multi-platform XSL formatter that aims to excel at DocBook formatting and that integrates easily with other programs and with scripting languages. Now BSD licensed and features an Cairo backend.

07jul2008

The Tail Recursive SECD Machine, by John D. Ramsdell. “Tail recursive abstract machines provide efficient support for iterative processes via the ordinary function calling mechanism. This document argues that the use of tail recursive abstract machines incurs only a small increase in theorem proving burden when compared with what is required when using ordinary abstract machines. The position is supported by comparing correctness proofs performed using the Boyer-Moore theorem prover. The cost of efficient support for iteration is small.”

The Largest Known Prime by Year: A Brief History, by Chris Caldwell.

Today Is The Day, Oo. WJW.

Let me find
The one they call Hitler
I will stalk him
I will bring him down
I will bring along
A powerful gun
Loaded with bullets
Obliterate his memory
— Dan Bern, God Said No

Debris, Jack Shedd on web site cluttering. “At some point, we just started throwing shit in.” (The whole blog is good, by the way, and the archive only goes back to April.)

Sphere Eversion, awesome abstract nonsense.

Potato, the version of JSqueak from HPI.

Macintosh on Nintendo DS, pretty awesome.

With her little funny eyes of hazel
With her little funny old blue hat
She will go and set the world on fire
No one ever thought she could do that
— Kerli, Walking On Air

The Pencil Project’s unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use. Uses Firefox 3.

How to be an instant Web me-2.0 developer, “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?”

06jul2008

Cthulhu Cthursday: Spored, awesome. Cthulhu fhtagn!

Almonnaise, a Vegan Mayonnaise Recipe. Surely good with a steak, too.

Don’t tell me you don’t know the difference
Between a lover and a fighter
With my pen and my electric typewriter
Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal
I’d still own the film rights and be working on the sequel
— Elvis Costello, Everyday I Write The Book

Steal This Wiki is a collaborative ground up rewrite based on Abbie Hoffman’s seminal work, “Steal This Book”. If you’re feeling nostalgic, you can download the original book in PDF form.

Why I Still Use Windows 95, badass.

If your language significantly benefits from syntax coloring then it’s
syntax is too complicated. Syntax highlighting is no substitute for
simple and consistent language design.
— Steve Dekorte

Bicameralism is a controversial hypothesis which argues that the human brain once assumed a state known as a bicameral mind in which cognitive functions are divided between one part of the brain which appears to be “speaking,” and a second part which listens and obeys.

I crave your company
And fall in the dark so be my lantern
Never have I seen that face on one so young
So shi-shine on me
Shi-shine on me
— Tanya Donelly, Lantern

Don’t knock brutalism, “This stark architectural style became synonymous with 70s ugliness, but is it about to undergo a renaissance?”

Rot-Schwarz-Gold, “Rot-Schwarz-Gold statt Schwarz-Rot-Gold: Schon wieder war in der ARD die falsche Deutschlandfahne zu sehen. Bei einer Liveübertragung flatterte sie plötzlich übergroß hinter einem Reporter – offensichtlich machte sich ein Fan einen Jux aus der peinlichen “Tagesthemen”-Panne.” Made my day.

05jul2008

SimplyNoise.com, the best white noise generator on the Internet. Shhhsshsshshssshshshhhshsssh.

Ernst Haeckel: Kunstformen der Natur 1899-1904, vollständige elektronische Faksimile-Ausgabe.

And if God is great and God is good why can’t he change the hearts of men?
Well maybe God himself is lost and needs help
Maybe God himself he needs all of our help
Maybe God himself is lost and needs help
He’s out upon the road to peace
— Tom Waits, Road To Peace

git-stitch-repo, stitch several git repositories into a git-fast-import stream. Neat.

‘It’s perfect madness’, “Tom Waits writes about his 20 most cherished albums of all time.”

Ethik in der Wissenschaft, Lyssenkoismus, Bogdanow, die Katholische Univesität Eichstätt und die Ecoli-Bakterien.

open source code in google, 24h are enough for permission to release, neat.

And the sky split and the planets hit,
Balls of jade dropped and existence stopped, stopped, stop, stop.
Little sister, the sky is falling, I don’t mind, I don’t mind.
Little sister, the fates are calling on you.
— Patti Smith, Kimberly

jGrowl is a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X’s Growl Framework works. Pretty nice.

04jul2008

Traced values for Haskell. Really really nifty!

firefox-mac-pdf, is a Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X. Finally a good reason to upgrade to Firefox 3.

I have never burned an American flag
If I did it was an accident
I have never dropped a bomb or defaced the
Washington monument
But you won’t find a flag on my doorstep
On the fourth of July
Too many criminals try to wrap themselves inside of it
It stands for too many lies
— Dan Bern, My Country Too

Solar water disinfection, also known as SODIS, is a method of disinfecting water using only sunlight and plastic PET bottles.

Google C++ Testing Framework, pretty nice actually. (I like how they use << for diagnostics.)

WiX (pronounced “wick”) is a text markup format. Its syntax is a blend of Donald Knuth’s TeX and various wiki markup.

I dream of the lies I told you
Wishing they were right
I dream of this day with you
Wishing it was just beginning
I dream of a New American Language
I dream of new beginnings
I dream of saturation bombing
I dream mostly about love
I have a dream.
— Dan Bern, New American Language

worms.c: formatting of complicated conditionals, Kragen Sitaker refactors old C code.

happy minimalism, Astrid Hagen shows some pictures of Ann Sophie Stærk.

Definition of Free Cultural Works, “This document defines “Free Cultural Works” as works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose. It also describes certain permissible restrictions that respect or protect these essential freedoms. The definition distinguishes between free works, and free licenses which can be used to legally protect the status of a free work. The definition itself is not a license; it is a tool to determine whether a work or license should be considered “free.”” A sane guideline, non-free CC licenses are detailed on the page as well as issues of the GFDL.

03jul2008

Franz Kafka, today is his 125th birthday.

Subterranean Homesick News, a great hack: showing news keywords on Bob Dylan’s paper cards.

HTTPMR is an implementation of Google’s famous MapReduce data processing model on clusters of HTTP servers. Clever.

robotfindskitten: a zen simulation in JavaScript!

You’re gonna walk that endless highway,
Walk that high-way till you die.
All you children goin’ my way,
Better tell your home-life sweet goodbye.
— J. R. Robertson, Endless Highway

Recursion Schemes: A Field Guide, by Edward Kmett. Very useful.

The Heap Lambda Machine, by Anton Salikhmetov. “This paper introduces a new machine architecture for evaluating lambda expressions using the normal-order reduction, which guarantees that every lambda expression will be evaluated if the expression has its normal form and the system has enough memory. The architecture considered here operates using heap memory only. Lambda expressions are represented as graphs, and all algorithms used in the processing unit of this machine are non-recursive.”

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. — Franz Kafka

Functional Programming in…Ada?, yikes.

About problem formulations and ordered permutations, Mauricio Fernandez is still alive.

Formal Methods in the Movies, funny.

The Dangers of Auto-Replace, mwhahahahahaha.

02jul2008

sacrilege.el, enjoy!

A Brainfuck interpreter written in Brainfuck. Amazingly compact!

Eee Monitor shots reveal Linux’s iMac rival, ASUS is doing good stuff lately.

And the kissing and the colour come crashing down
Down down down
Down around me
Down down down
Around
— Sisters Of Mercy, Burn

Lina Scheynius, really good photography. PNSFW, nudity.

PMake: A Tutorial, by Adam de Boor. BSD make seems to be much nicer than GNU make.

RubyFrontier is a way of maintaining and generating Web sites. It imitates UserLand Frontier, but it’s written in Ruby.

WokFi is a term now commonly used to indicate a style of Wi-Fi antenna made out of simple low-cost Asian cookware scoops, or similar easy to find household metallic reflective items.

Ometa for Scheme, yum.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, explained by Chris Edward Dupilka.

The thought to talk
they walk the talk
so lets just go from place to place
and as long as we don’t talk from face to face
— Clan Of Xymox, Stranger

Collaborate and Connect with Subversion, by Ryan Irelan at A List Apart. “Technology can promote teamwork and keep projects in check. Enter Subversion.” Yay. ;)

Getting Out of Binding Situations in JavaScript, by Christophe Porteneuve at A List Apart. “Overall, binding in JavaScript is not a difficult concept, but it is far too often ignored or glossed over by JavaScripters, which leads to confusion.”

Eliza is a sequencial, functional logic programming language. It borrows concepts from Prolog, Lisp, Icon, Haskell, Bash, Oz and C/C++. From Prolog it borrows backtracking. From Lisp stems the concept of first-order-functions. This concept had a great influence on the design of the language.

01jul2008

Non-Deterministic Recursive Ascent Parsing, by Renee Leermakers. “A purely functional implementation of LR-parsers is given, together with a simple correctness proof. It is presented as a generalization of the recursive descent parser.”

The Absolute Film, by Dr. William Moritz. “Absolute Film, by contrast, would present things which could be expressed uniquely with cinematic means.”

Hey desert wind
Carry me away
Someplace where I know what to do and what to say
And hey, when I’m sleeping
I dream of a camel sleigh
And a desert wind to carry me away
— Dan Bern, Desert Wind

BundleBuggy is a system for tracking the status of merge requests made on mailing lists.

Ice Cube Maker, Tetris style. Wanthave.

Faustfeathers, a play by John Kessel.

You say the city looks different, it s somehow lost its charm
Fire engine fly by with its annoying alarm
Did the angels ever really look this sad and blue?
You say the city has changed, well maybe it’s you.
— Dan Bern, City

Dependently Typed Programming 2008, a TYPES topical workshop. Slides are available. Recommended, especially Lennart Augustsson’s.

das blinde-kuh-system, Lydia schlägt vor: “Lösungsmöglichkeit 1: Rückwärtsgang ausbauen.”

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